Abstract
The recent growth in ambulatory surgery has imposed new demands on patient care and hospital information processing. The Day Surgery Unit of the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania has cared for about 16,000 patients during the last five years. To meet the resulting information needs, the Hospital has established HORNET, the Hospital Operating Room NETwork. Physically, this is a network of IBM PC's which is equipped with patient-monitoring instrumentation, feeding into a VAX 8200. We describe the essential features of the network: the hardware, software, and data bases constituting the system, the reports prepared by the system, ongoing work to characterize the patient population (which is not similar to that undergoing inpatient procedures), and its monitoring and anesthetic measurement problems. We consider further applications using artificial intelligence techniques to handle these problems with fewer skilled professionals.